Characterising UKIP?

[butchersapron]

So, in the last two posts we have you taffboy firstly, linking to a man with mental health issues who isn't in UKIP and doesn't represent them and secondly a dan hodges piece, approvingly quoting him quoting either a labour tory or lib-dem official or candidate attempting a pretty transparent smear. That graphic he gives doesn't even support the main contention of his piece as it fails to demonstrate the UKIP vote melting away. Nor does it make any logical sense - if UKIP are left with pretty much only BNP hardcore vote they would be on at best 1% not the low to medium teens (with 17%s still popping up regularly) that hodges has to admit they are on.

Can you tell us how either or both of these things help us establish a critical accurate characterisation of UKIP on any level (membership, leadership, voting supporters, protest voters etc)?

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Hi Butchers. Hope you're well.

What does it tell us that Bonehill uses UKIP as a vehicle for promoting his hatred? Quite a lot I think. The same as Griffin, Lennon / Robinson and BF endorsing them.

The Hodges piece, to be honest, I was treating the thread more as just a general place to stick UKIP stuff on. I think his point about polls is that they aren't increasing, despite the "major" status accorded by OFCOM. "hardcore BNP switchers" would, I guage be higher than 1%, perhaps knocking towards 5 compared to the 2009 Euros. It may have been an overstatement, but it reflects something I have genuinely seen in the last 12 months or so...a continuing trend for UKIP supporters to adopt EDL/BNP tropes...the endless moaning about "cultural marxism", "traitors", "TRUE BRITISH" etc.

And is Bonehead the only case of anti-semitism in the mix?

Perhaps not.

"Get off my doorstep, Jew"

http://m.folkestoneherald.co.uk/RAC...told-shocked/story-26348806-detail/story.html

Care to characterise that?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Simple.... Diet BNP

You have to be simple to think that UKIP is "diet BNP".

 

[ViolentPanda]

Blimey, what a shame that you weren't there on P1 to answer the OP. Would have saved loads of posting.

It's always gratifying to see old verities unchanged by time and experience, though, even if it is the ridiculous trope about UKIP being a more populist version of the BNP.

 

[ViolentPanda]

The Boneheil Chronicles (cont.)

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/20/man-abusive-tweets-jack-monroe-bail

Which has what to do with UKIP besides showing that some of their supporters may have mental health issues, just like the supporters of any other political party (1 in 4 of us will have a mental health issue serious enough to require treatment during our lifetime)?

 

[butchersapron]

Hi Butchers. Hope you're well.

What does it tell us that Bonehill uses UKIP as a vehicle for promoting his hatred? Quite a lot I think. The same as Griffin, Lennon / Robinson and BF endorsing them.

The Hodges piece, to be honest, I was treating the thread more as just a general place to stick UKIP stuff on. I think his point about polls is that they aren't increasing, despite the "major" status accorded by OFCOM. "hardcore BNP switchers" would, I guage be higher than 1%, perhaps knocking towards 5 compared to the 2009 Euros. It may have been an overstatement, but it reflects something I have genuinely seen in the last 12 months or so...a continuing trend for UKIP supporters to adopt EDL/BNP tropes...the endless moaning about "cultural marxism", "traitors", "TRUE BRITISH" etc.

And is Bonehead the only case of anti-semitism in the mix?

Perhaps not.

"Get off my doorstep, Jew"

http://m.folkestoneherald.co.uk/RAC...told-shocked/story-26348806-detail/story.html

Care to characterise that?

What it tells us is precisely nothing. At least about UKIP. What it tells us if that you have abandoned any attempt at critical characterisation - both here and in the wider world. Instead preferring the simple they're all BNP racists approach and attempting nothing else whatsoever.

That's also evident by both your choice of hodges link (ffs) and the bit from it that you choose to focus on - i.e a tory/lib-dem or labour candidate/official doing exactly what you are and telling hodges they're all BNP - and with the sum total of sweet FA evidence offered to support this claim - and him passing it along to you as fact and you then passing it on again.

There's also that same shared desperation in your defence of his argument - UKIP haven't melted away, the last poll on his little graphic showed them on 17%. And it's there again in your defence of his BNP claim - that UKIP would be around 5% if they ('hardcore BNP switchers') did in fact make up the bulk of UKIP voters - apart from this being well below the 13% UKIP low point in his graph the BNP only managed to score 1.9% of the vote in the 2010 election. So just how likely do you think it is that the UKIP 13-17% they are currently getting is from 'hardcore BNP switchers'? I reckon it's more to be a load of smeary bollocks that you , hodges, and the lib-dems/tories and labour party are happy to put about.

That link doesn't work but i'm pretty sure it'll be more of the same stuff.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I know a few people voting for UKIP who would be horrified to think they would be considered racists. For many it's become the acceptable protest vote, much like the LibDems use to be. He's not going to get many MPs so people don't see it as that risky. It's shame there isn't a similar thriving nationalist movement as to the SNP in England; that would be quite interesting to watch. Sadly groups like the BNP have forever linked nationalism with racism in England.

The problem there being that with regard to English nationalism, for the last 100 or so years most of the signifiers chosen by those who self-identify as English nationalists have been negative, insofar as they generally refer back to tropes that are racially monocultural, sexist and classless. We've seen abhorrent examples of English nationalism repeatedly, even from the supposedly more considered versions of it, so finding a "neutral" English nationalism that could act as a positive force for unity would be a very hard task.

 

[butchersapron]

The big three parties (as was) got 88% of the national vote last time around. The BNP got 1.9%. The last poll on UK polling report's round up has them (the big three) combined on 70% this time around - BNP no longer even appear, they don't breach 1%. It also has UKIP on 17%. I guess that 14% rise in the UKIP vote must be down to that 1.9% BNP vote switching to UKIP. I can see no other way the numbers could possibly work.

 

[treelover]

The fourth woman running for the Great Grimsby seat is Val O’Flynn, the ex-Militant Tendency candidate for the radical left-wing Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. I met her one Friday lunchtime in a sprawling hotel bar near Grimsby Town station where mothers with pushchairs and plates of food shared space with tottering, booze-darkened drinkers. We talked for a while about TUSC, its desire for a socialist transformation of society and its policy of quitting the EU – ‘nothing more than a pro-business, neoliberal organisation’. I could see, when she talked about immigration, what a gaping space there was on the radical left for Ukip to enter. The open door immigration policy, she said, ‘suited the capitalist because it increases the labour force, it has a downward effect on wages, and immigrants are much easier to exploit. Immigrants come over here partly because of the faults of capitalism in their own countries. What is a minimum wage here is a good wage compared to what it would be at home. That brings the wages down for the rest of us.’

From the Meek article, is this TUSC's position?

She smiled. ‘I’m engaged to a Ukip man,’ she said. To Chris Osborne, in fact, the campaign manager for Steve Harness, Ukip candidate for Cleethorpes. They met over a shared cause. ‘I’ve been banned from Morrison’s for doing a protest about them selling Israeli goods and Chris has been sort of fighting this pro-Palestine corner for years so that’s how we got talking.’ He would have been very much at home in the old Labour Party, she said.

Bizzarely or not the TUSC candidate is engaged to a Kipper

A few days after I left Grimsby, there was another leak. The Sunday Mirror got hold of a recording of a showdown between the neo-socialist local Ukippers and a party official over the lack of support for Ayling. On the tape, Osborne is heard to describe Ayling as ‘possibly the worst candidate we could have’. He says: ‘I cannot endorse or support a candidate who I genuinely believe – whether anybody else does or not – who I genuinely believe is racist.’

Btw, its a superb article, and indicates UKIP is not homogenous and has plenty of old socialists in it, probably more socialist than some of its enemies.

 

[treelover]

Fitzgerald says he has £500 million to spend on new projects in the Humber, but his position as steward of one of Canada and Singapore’s far-flung estates does not permit him to set money aside to mend the roof of the ice factory. ‘We’re happy to talk to anybody who has a plan for it,’ he said. ‘Ultimately, the renovation of a building like that is not a business we are in.’

A Tory Kipper like Ayling is not going to do anything to challenge that view, even though UKIP are meant to be against Globalism and the putative voters would expect her to rail against it..

Btw, my older friend who i mention a fair bit who is a full on campaigner recently took on the above, Associated British Ports(ABP) over a pollution issue, they are a very shady global outfit.

 

[ViolentPanda]

What does it tell us that Bonehill uses UKIP as a vehicle for promoting his hatred? Quite a lot I think. The same as Griffin, Lennon / Robinson and BF endorsing them.

It doesn't tell us anything of the sort. "The same as..."? Is Bonehill a known hard-rightist, then?
Nope, he's just some unknown with a mental health problem and crap politics.

 

[butchersapron]

Handily, from YG today:

 

[laptop]

Handily, from YG today:

I have tried, and utterly failed, to understand the figures in that table, and the link isn't helping me.

 

[treelover]

Shakespeare was born as Stephan Kukowski in 1957 in Mönchengladbach, where his German father, a journalist, was the German Press Liaison Officer of Headquarters British Army of the Rhine. When he was five years old, the family moved to the UK, where he was educated at Christ's Hospital school near Horsham, West Sussex. Stephan was also an artist (as Stephan Kukowski) creating The Brunch Museum together with the fluxus artist George Brecht, first exhibited in London in 1976. After graduating from Oxford, he took a one-year teaching course in Kingston upon Thames, during which time he was a member of the Socialist Workers' Student Society. He became a teacher and headmaster in Los Angeles, California in the 1980s. After marrying Rosamund Shakespeare, he exchanged his surname for that of his wife.

After returning home to the UK from the US, he became involved in politics, first as a political commentator and then as Jeffrey Archer’s Campaign Director during and after his failed London mayoral campaign. He was also a Conservative Party pollster.

Interesting to see that the boss of You Guv and a Tory was once in SWSS.

 

[butchersapron]

I have tried, and utterly failed, to understand the figures in that table, and the link isn't helping me.

On the left you have 2010 vote of 32 000 voters on YouGov's book. On the the top you have the Voting intention for each party in 2015. Looking at the UKIP column we see 39% of their 2015 vote voted tory last time, 13 labour, 15 lib-dem and so on.

 

[bemused]

On the left you have 2010 vote of 32 000 voters on YouGov's book. On the the top you have the Voting intention for each party in 2015. Looking at the UKIP column we see 39% of their 2015 vote voted tory last time, 13 labour, 15 lib-dem and so on.

Does that mean only 67% of people in that poll who voted Labour last time intend to this time?

 

[articul8]

Does that mean only 67% of people in that poll who voted Labour last time intend to this time?

No, it means of those who intend to vote Labour this time, 67% voted Labour last time

 

[butchersapron]

Does that mean only 67% of people in that poll who voted Labour last time intend to this time?

It means of the 32 000 people polled those that voted labour in 2010 and who also be voting labour in 2010 make up 67% of the current labour vote.

 

[laptop]

It means of the 32 000 people polled those that voted labour in 2010 and who also be voting labour in 2010 make up 67% of the current labour vote.

Thanks!

Was trying to add up the rows...

 

[Buddy Bradley]

Our local UKIP candidate looks like a Bond villain.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

No, it means of those who intend to vote Labour this time, 67% voted Labour last time

Yeah, took me a while, but this is what it means.

 

[two sheds]

Meaning the labour vote should be 33% (?) higher this time than last?

Eta: or no because you have to deduct the people in the column who voted labour last time but aren't doing this time?

 

[articul8]

I really don't understand why anyone who voted Labour last time would vote Tory or LD this time - some people are just weird.

 

[brogdale]

YG have produced a nice graphical version of their 'churn' data that might be better for those not so keen on numbers...

 

[mk12]

Surely the table Butchers linked to confirms that UKIP isn't fascist, but a populist right-wing party that appeals to a broad spectrum of voters. I know working-class former BNP voters who will be voting UKIP, but I also know middle-class students who'll be doing so, for quite very different reasons. They've done well at tapping into anger about immigration, the 'political class', Europe, political correctness, the betrayal of the Labour party, Islam, the failings of the NHS, and much more. Christ, even I agree with a lot of their individual policies (abolishing parking charges at hospitals, ensuring those who work in the NHS speak English, etc.). Yes, they have a large number of racist, sexist, and homophobic members in their party. Yes, they attract votes from former BNP voters. But you shouldn't define UKIP by these things alone. I'm sure the Tory party (and all parties?) has racist, sexist, and homophobic members in their party. Does this make them 'fascist'?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

ensuring those who work in the NHS speak English

Really? You think this is a problem that needs central government intervention?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Surely the table Butchers linked to confirms that UKIP isn't fascist, but a populist right-wing party that appeals to a broad spectrum of voters.

Don't think it does show this really. Taking brogdale's thing, which contains more information, as many Labour voters from 2010 have switched to the Tories this time as have switched to UKIP.

 

[butchersapron]

It's the same information.

 

[butchersapron]

And it shows twice as many lab to ukip switchers as labour to tory.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It's the same information.

No it's not. Not unless I'm reading it wrongly. The second one shows the total numbers in proportion to each other. So there are roughly the same numbers switching to each.